Samsung Galaxy S3 Gets CyanogenMod Customised Firmware

The popular CyanogenMod 9 firmware is now available for Samsung Galaxy S3 users, if you know what you’re doing

Adventurous owners of Samsung’s Galaxy S3 handset can now get rid of the Korean company’s TouchWiz UX Nature user interface (and its stock apps that come by default with the phone) and flash the ROM with the popular CyanogenMod 9 firmware.

The custom firmware developers have this week released the first nightly builds of CyanogenMod 9 for the Galaxy S3, based on a streamlined version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

These builds come with a strict "health warning" in that they will have more bugs than final release versions. At the moment, there are reported problems with the LED flash and FM radio, among other quirks that have yet to be fixed.

The community-developed CyanogenMod releases are popular among people wanting to speed up an underclocked handset or to free up memory by stripping out ‘bloatware’ that manufacturers or mobile service providers often add onto the vanilla Android firmware. For example, it works wonders on cheap smartphones such as the Orange San Francisco.

Given the relatively large memory capacity and high speed of the quad-core Galaxy S3 there may not be huge advantages from changing the firmware. It risks ‘bricking’ the phone and you’ll certainly invalidate its warranty. But if you love tinkering about with a high-end bit of hardware at your own risk, you can find out more at the link below.